“In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh.’”
“Oh” is exactly what came to mind when I finished reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I was baffled at how real and alive every fictional story in O’Brien’s novel seemed. Even though I knew the novel was entirely made up, I wanted to believe every word that O’Brien wrote. My mind breathed life into Vietnam’s paddies and Tim’s comrades and young Linda. Once something, no matter how unbelievable or impossible, is given life, we will hold onto and carry its story forever, willing it to life over and over again, hoping that maybe, just maybe, one day it will be our reality.
“Once you’re alive, you can’t ever be dead.” This is true for people and for stories. Throughout the novel O’Brien speaks of multiple people who die and tells how he tries to bring them back to life. With Ted Lavender, he discusses Jimmy Cross’s guilt and reliving of the event, as he constantly blames himself and knows that if he just would have been focused in that moment, Lavender could still be alive. Other comrades of O’Brien’s die and he keeps reminiscing their lives and deaths throughout his life in order to keep them alive also. In this fashion, he is able to will an “allusion of alliveness.” I also fell for this allusion when reading the novel. I constantly kept forgetting that all the stories are fake. I just couldn’t shake the hope that they were actually true.
Perhaps the most touching story in this entire novel is not about war at all. O’Brien’s childhood love Linda dies of cancer at a young age. He then wills her back to life in his dreams and imagines what their lives together would be if she would have survived. He even prefers sleep to his actual life because he gets to see Linda and make up their future in his dreams. He says “I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story, miracles can happen.” In stories, we can live limitless, achieving our biggest dreams and pushing the impossible. We yearn for stories, because matter of factually they are better than real life. We can shape and mold them into exactly what we want them to be.
I have just begun to unravel the many truths in a story that fundamentally is based on no truth at all. In stories, no one dies and the princess always gets her happily ever after. We continue to hold onto loved ones and dreams through stories, saving lives and living our wished for realities.
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